


Fallow Country

by metropolisjournal (TKodami)



Series: DCEU Kinkmeme ficlets [1]
Category: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, DC Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bruce Wayne's mourning rituals, Choking, Ficlet, M/M, Manual Restraint, Resurrection, graveyard, improbable timing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-07
Updated: 2017-06-07
Packaged: 2018-11-10 00:18:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11115921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TKodami/pseuds/metropolisjournal
Summary: Bruce visits Clark's grave in Smallville.Written for thedceu prompt: Bruce/Clark in a graveyard





	Fallow Country

Bruce lays marigolds on the headstone. Mourning has been a feature of his life—a clockwork of observance—but he never quite knows what to do with himself here, crouched next to a simple granite marker rimed with winter’s penetrating cold. He turns his collar up against the wind that scours the fallow country. 

He doesn’t need to read the epitaph. 

(Clark Joseph Kent. Beloved Son.)

He doesn’t need to re-live the handful of earth he scattered over the coffin. 

(Or how low the sun had sunk on the horizon when he’d finally moved himself from the trees to complete that gesture.)

Bruce rests a gloved hand on the stone, expecting the bite of ice even through the leather. The stone warms the joints of his hands—and it’s almost pleasant, Bruce connected to the stone, connected to the earth, where Bruce can pretend that the man beneath it had died for something worth dying for, and not because suspicion had driven them to each other’s throats. 

“Better if it had been me,” he says at last. 

The heat creeps up so gradually that Bruce only becomes aware of it when the stone burns a hole through the black leather and contacts with his skin. 

The pain startles him into action. Wrenching his hand away, Bruce recoils into a wary crouch. The headstone begins to glow with tremendous heat; the tremors underneath his feet finally grab his attention; the graveyard has gone silence except for a knocking–a misfiring cylinder in an idling engine. 

In his nightmares, he’s played out this scenario in a hundred different ways. 

But he doesn’t have the Suit; he doesn’t have anything but his two hands, a Burberry coat, and three batarangs sewn into the lining of his Gucci jacket. Bruce’s hand slips into his jacket, and he tears at the stitching of the false panel. The batarangs fall into his hand, and he slips them into the sleeve of the jacket. If he needs them—he knocking against the ground swells into a dull roar—if the situation requires violence, he won’t be unprepared.

*

The hand that punches through the frozen topsoil isn’t human. 

The gaunt gray flesh barely looks alive as fingers scrabble at the dirt, seeking for purchase. 

Bruce fights down the wild horror that rises in him. He leans against the gravestone (cooling again, from whatever energy had heated it) for leverage, and grabs the hand and _pulls_. The frozen soil splinters and shifts, fighting against Bruce, but he braces his shoulder and strains. The dirt grudgingly gives up what was buried within it; when the forearm is out of the widening hole, Bruce grabs onto it, and hauls it across the length of his body, and lays back, panting, when the ground has given up the living thing trapped inside of it. 

Bruce laughs hoarsely.

The body on top of him is so unbearably light.

*

Alive, alive, Clark is _alive_. 

Clark’s pushes himself off of Bruce, but his arm slips and he faceplants in the loose dirt. 

Bruce sits up and watches Clark clumsily work his way back to his feet without interfering in his wobbly first steps. Bruce sensed power in his movement when he had hammered his way through six feet of frozen soil, but that power appears to have been depleted. 

Clark runs one of his hands over skin that hasn’t seen the sun in a year, and turns his face instinctively towards the sun. The arm that had done the impossible dangles at his side, useless.

“Clark.” 

He responds to the name too well, pupils constricting to points of fury. The hand on Bruce’s throat feels like penance, and he is hauled up, and pressed against a tree, choking, guttering on stale air. 

Clark’s jaw clicks—a sibilant hiss rumbling in his throat—as his eyes jump from point to point on Bruce’s face. His hair spreads around him in a frenzied halo. He pulls Bruce back by his throat, and slams him into the trunk again as Bruce had done during their fight in Gotham’s abandoned headquarters near the Port. 

(When Bruce had slammed Clark through a sink and dragged him to be hooked and gutted in the halls of justice below.)

Clark’s—reliving that anger, stuck in a loop remembering the last hours of his life. 

Bruce slips a hand into Clark’s free palm. The fingers twitch. An involuntary motor movement, but for a moment, Bruce feels the moment of panic where the fingers aren’t, and close around his hand, and this is happening for real, and not just—

Clark still feels it and recoils. Bruce is released and drops to his knees as he breathes heavily, pulling in air he doesn’t need.

(Bruce has definitely experienced worse.) 

Clark regards his immobile hand in what looks to be horror: gentleness from an enemy is disorienting; gentleness from Bruce must be profoundly disturbing. 

Bruce surges up; his hand falls across Clark’s face in a stinging slap. The blow doesn’t break his hand, so he does it again, and again, until he breaks kryptonian skin. Clark darts his tongue into the corner of his mouth, and—

Bruce hitches back against the tree when Clark steps forward.

Clark dabs at his blood and examines it like it’s the most miraculous thing he’s seen.

“Do you know me?” Bruce’s breath is coming shallow, now. 

A year has changed much about Bruce’s thinking. Breathing, heart rate, perspiration, blood flow; all of the signs are there, if Clark cares to read them. 

Clark presses forward. His skin rasps against Bruce’s, dry as paper, as he slides his hand up to Bruce’s neck, closing over his windpipe gently, testing Bruce’s willingness. Bruce’s chin comes up as he fades around the edges of Clark’s inexorable strength, because it’s all rushing back, now: the color into his skin, the light into his eyes, the strength of his body—and the understanding about what Bruce will let him do with it.

“I know you,” Clark whispers roughly against Bruce’s cheek. It’s a start, anyway.

**Author's Note:**

> \o/
> 
> Edited and expanded from the kinkmeme.


End file.
